After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Cebidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements.

The KDE community has finalised another update to the 3.5 series. While not a very exciting release, 3.5.10 brings numerous bugfixes and translation updates to those who choose to stay with KDE 3.5. The fixes are thinly spread across KPDF with a number of crash fixes, KGPG and probably most interesting various fixes in Kicker, KDE 3's panel.

Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the KDE project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court. Read on for more details.

On Monday at Akademy, KDE's yearly world summit, the KDE e.V. held its general assembly, covering a wide range hot topics, regarding licensing and community scalability. While part of the meeting is dictated by intricacies of German association law, the AGM also provides a way of effectively solving issues arising in the KDE community and deciding on ways to move forward as an organisation. This year's KDE e.V. General Assembly endorsed a Code of Conduct, the Community Working Group and a Fiduciary License Agreement for KDE contributors.

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for Q1 and Q2 2008, covering January to March, and April to August 2008. This document includes reports of the board and the working groups about the KDE e.V. activities of the first two quarters of 2008, as well as event summaries and future plans. All long-term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V.

6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. Highlights of KDE 4.1 are the KDE PIM suite, which has returned in its KDE 4 incarnation, a more mature Plasma desktop and many, many new features and applications. Make sure to take some time to read through the high-level changelog or even the more detailed feature plan on Techbase. Before you try KDE 4.1, please read the KDE4 End User FAQ and make an educated guess whether KDE 4.1 is for you.

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page.
KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th.

The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation today announced that they will hold their yearly conferences, Akademy and GUADEC in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade.
"The GNOME community is very excited about the co-hosted GUADEC and Akademy" says Behdad Esfahbod, president at the GNOME foundation, "GUADEC has traditionally been a very important chance for our community to meet in person, build great working relationships and make new friends. We're looking forward to having the opportunity to extend those relationships to our KDE colleagues at Akademy/GUADEC." KDE e.V.'s vice-president Adriaan de Groot adds "KDE e.V. is looking forward to a co-located conference, where the GNOME and KDE communities can mingle and cooperate as never before in one location. Gran Canaria is uniquely located at the junction of Europe and Africa, close to the Americas and is a fitting place for a historic 'meet-your-neighbours' conference."

Another milestone on the road towards KDE 4.1 has been packaged and put online for testing. The release notes highlight some features in Dolphin and Gwenview, as well as additional information on where to get the release, make sure you also check your distributor's websites as well. While there are some bugs left, the release already works quite solidly on most people's machines. Performance problems on NVidia chips remain, but we are confident that those will be solved by the teams over at NVidia in one of the next releases of their graphics driver. In KDE 4.1, there is also some preliminary Mac and Windows support coming up. Several apps can be tried by a wider audience on those proprietary platforms this summer already. On the side of Free operating systems, support for OpenSolaris is coming along nicely, but is not free of bugs yet.

The KDE Community has today made available the fifth update to KDE 4.0. Although the changelog is not particularly long, the release should be worthwhile to upgrade to. KWin (according to some pronounced "quinn" instead of Kay-Win) has gotten some clipping fixes, also some dim and fade effects work on cards that can only do compositing via XRender. Juk, the lightweight music player has received some fixes regarding keyboard shortcuts, playback and cover art. Kopete, the instant messenger in 4.0.5 has some crashes fixed. The changelog has the details (although probably not all bugfixes have been recorded here). Overall, we expect to make the users' experience with this release a bit nicer.